In 2016, I visited Rome for a week. On a sunny Sunday, I rented a bike to ride the Via Appia Antica, or the Appian Way. This ancient road has led into Rome for 2,400 years. Untold drovers, farmers, soldiers, citizens, and slaves have worn deep ruts in the ancient road, deep enough to occasionally jack knife my bicycle’s front wheel.

Appia Antica is lined with the ruins of hundreds of monuments and memorials. As I rode along I snapped a photo of a particularly well-preserved memorial. It wasn’t until I got home that I inspected that photo carefully. It was not a good photo – a mindless snapshot, in fact – but the ancient memorial was captured in good detail. I looked at the figures and the names.

Behold my shitty snapshot!

It featured a Roman man named Caius (Gaius) Rabirius Postumus Hermadorus. In the center was his wife, who had taken the name Rabiria Demaris. On the right was an image of their “Usia Prima Sacerdos”, or family god. She was Isidis, or Isis, the Egyptian goddess who leads the dead to the afterlife.

I had never heard of this Rabirius fellow. I wondered who he was, why his memorial was so nifty, and why he had taken an Egyptian goddess to represent his family.

This led me on a fascinating journey into the most turbulent period in Roman history: the dawn of the Imperium. Rabirius may have been a nobody, but he was heavily involved with the most famous Romans of his day.

We should begin by backing up a bit and looking into Rabirius’ past. He was born in a patrician family and as a young man was adopted by his uncle, a senator also named Gaius Rabirius. The elder Gaius Rabirius was determined to build a legacy with this boy, but little did the old man know that a rash decision would put his entire family and fortune in jeopardy – an object lesson the young Rabirius would fail to learn…

The elder Rabirius was from a respected family and by 100 BCE had become a senator of Rome. At that time, the republic was in turmoil. The optimates (the ruling elite) were squaring off against the populares (dedicated to helping the plebeians). In the senate, battle lines were being drawn.

What the optimates and populares may have looked like.

Two great generals – Lucius Cornelius Sulla and Gaius Marius – represented the two sides. Sulla was an optimate who believed the republic should be ruled by wealthy patrician families. He scorned the recent land reforms being introduced by the populares. Marius, whose military reforms included opening the army to plebs, had become sympathetic to the cause of the populares. These two influential men had influential followers in the senate. Things were heating up.

In 100 BCE, Marius formed a political circle with the tribune of the plebs, Lucius Appuleius Saturninus and his pal Gaius Servilius Glaucia. Marius became the anvil while Saturninus and Glaucia pounded away like hammers, beating out land reform laws that favored the plebeians and common citizens, usually at the cost of the wealthy land-owning optimates. As you can imagine, the entrenched wealthy elite weren’t going to take this sitting down. Their champion Sulla had some friends, too. He also had soldiers willing to do anything for him.

Sulla (L) and Marius (R).

When Saturninus successfully pushed through some land reform laws, Sulla stepped in. He and his optimate buddies drafted decrees that rolled back the reforms and threatened violent reprisals against anyone who dared oppose them. The senate was now split, with violence sure to follow.

In 99 BCE there were important elections. Saturninus and Glaucius kept their seats. But in their zeal to win at any cost, they decided it was a good idea to blatantly murder the optimate candidate for the consulship of Rome, a man named Gaius Memmius. Now, Memmius may not have been a beloved character, but to slaughter him during the ballot count was a bit much, even for the plebeians of Rome.

Things started getting out of hand.

The people went ballistic and demanded justice against the murderers. The senate declared Saturninus and Glaucius enemies of Rome. The two men fled to a defensible building on the Capitoline hill. Roman sentries cut off their water supply and began a siege. Marius, whose reputation had saved him from the taint of being associated with Saturninus and Glaucius, stepped in and offered the men safe passage to the old senate house known as the Curia Hostilia. Marius assured Saturninus and Glaucius that if they went with him willingly they would receive a fair trial and possibly even exoneration. The two men agreed. Marius guided them safely to the Curia Hostilia.

Enter the elder Gaius Rabirius.

Rabirius was an old school optimate. He believed in the supremacy of the landed aristocracy and he was determined to see any populist reforms strangled in the crib. In his mind, he could not afford to have Saturninus and Glaucius escape justice. They were dangerous and had to be stopped. So Rabirius and a group of his best friends climbed up the walls of the Curia Hostilia, peeled back some of the roof tiles and proceeded to rain huge rocks down onto Saturninus, Glaucius, and a bunch of their followers. They were literally shooting fish in a barrel and all the men inside the Curia were slaughtered in a fairly horrific way.

The Curia Julia replaced the Curia Hostilia in 53 BCE.

Rome may have been a wild and wooly place where powerful men could get away with murder, but there were limits and Rabirius had crossed them. One of the men killed inside the Curia Hostilia had a nephew named Titus Labienus. Labienus was not happy that his uncle was summarily executed by a gang of wealthy optimates. But the optimates maintained a solid grip on Rome. Rabirius and his gang were unofficially excused of their crimes. The fact that Rabirius and his pals remained not only free but able to retain their senate seats galled young Titus Labienus. But the optimates were in control and there was little he could do.

Fast forward to 63 BCE. The still-seething Labineus visited his new pal, a populist Roman senator named Julius Caesar. He wanted Caesar to provide justice for his uncle’s killer, that awful old man Gaius Rabirius, who still sat in the senate house.

Caesar was from an influential family and though he was sympathetic to the populares he also considered himself a law-and-order kind of guy. He wanted to teach the senate an object lesson in what happens when you excuse extra-legal executions, and he wanted to do it legally. This would put the optimates on notice that Rome was no longer a free-for-all, and that good civic reforms could not be easily reversed by dictums from the optimates.

Actor Ciaran Hinds was the best Julius Caesar EVAR.

So Caesar revived a very old criminal statute known as Perduello, a form of high treason. On the senate floor, he leveled the charge of Perduello at Gaius Rabirius. If convicted, the punishment was death – and not just any death. Those guilty of Perduello would be thrown from the Tarpeian Rock, a seventy foot cliff at the summit of the Capitoline Hill. Those who survived the fall would be left to die slowly. No one would assist them. Their assets would be seized and their houses razed to the ground. The elder Gaius Rabirius was in a world of shit.

In addition to being a craven murderer, Gaius Rabirius was also a resourceful man. He knew the optimates in the senate still held sway. He reached out to them and they responded. Just as the people were urging their senators to declare Rabirius guilty, the optimate consul of Rome pulled down the military flag from the Janiculum hill, a signal that the consul had officially dissolved the seated assembly. No conclusion of guilt could be leveled against Gaius Rabirius.

With no findings, there was no conviction. Rabirius was alive, but he was not exonerated. So he hired the best damn attorney in all of Rome: Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero was not just a lawyer; he was considered one of the greatest orators and political thinkers of his age. His reputation resounds down the millenia, and most Roman scholars consider him to be one of the most thoughtful and brilliant Romans who ever lived. Cicero took the case. He liked hard cases.

Cicero looking very statesman-like.

There was no point in proving the innocence of Gaius Rabirius. He was caught red-handed after the events at the Curia Hostilia those many years ago. There was zero doubt he had led the murders of Saturninus and Glacius. So Cicero took another tack: obfuscate and re-direct. His speech in defense of Gaius Rabirius survives and is known as “Pro Rabirio Reo Perduellionis” (In Defense of Rabirius Accused of Treason). In it, Cicero asks the senate to recall recent acts of political murder that went not only unpunished, but became damn near codified. Before he levels an outright claim of hypocrisy at his fellow senators, he proceeds to ramble through a huge chunk of Roman history, replete with its vendettas, conspiracies, and extra-legal murders.

If this is the history and hallmark of Rome, Cicero asks, who are we to condemn Gaius Rabirius for continuing this state of affairs? By what right does Rome resurrect this outdated charge of Perduello? Why now? And why Rabirius? Is it because of…maybe…I dunno…a hypocritical political vendetta maybe? Hmm?

Loathe as I am to condense Cicero’s brilliant (and outrageously cynical) “Pro Rabirio Reo Perduellionis” to such a short synopsis, I must. For we must now return to the story of Gaius Rabirius’ adopted son Gaius Rabirius Postumus. Suffice it to say the elder Rabirius was acquitted and retained his seat and position. Hats off to Cicero for accomplishing the improbable. He will return to our story…

Young Rabirius Postumus training to become a psycho.

Young Gaius Rabirius Postumus studied hard. He learned oration and law and got pretty good at it. His father’s acquittal kept the family name reasonably pure, so young Rabirius had a good chance of making his own mark in the senate of Rome. And so he did. But like his father, his impetuous nature would lead him into serious trouble.

In the intervening years between the senatorships of the elder Rabirius and the young Rabirius, many of the same players were still on the stage. Cicero was still a respected senator, as was Julius Caesar. Young Gaius Rabirius Postumus took a seat alongside them. He was an optimate and a conservative, but even if you were in the majority, getting political allies was never easy. You had to hitch a ride on the biggest star you could find and young Rabirius chose Gnaeus Pompey Magnus – Pompey the Great. Pompey was the grandaddy of the conservative optimates. A good choice.

Pompey was a tremendously successful and ruthless general. He had fought brilliantly in foreign wars as well as a civil wars at the head of Sulla’s armies during the pitched battles between the populares and optimates. He put down rebellions in Sicily and Africa. He mopped up Spartacus’ slave army during the Third Servile War, hunting down and massacring 6,000 men, women, and children. He wiped out Mediterranean piracy, then soundly defeated Mithridates in Armenia, ending decades of failure with a resounding victory. He “pacified” Syria and Judea and enjoyed no less than three triumphs in Rome.

Pompey looking very Magnus.

In short, Pompey was the very definition of a victorious Roman general. Now that he sat as one of the two consuls of Rome, young Gaius Rabirius Postumus danced his way into Pompey’s sphere and soon gained favor. It’s good to have powerful friends, but Rabirius would soon learn that if you pledge yourself to the Godfather, it may not work out as well as you expect.

In 58 BCE, there were some stirrings in Egypt. The Ptolemaic King of Egypt (Ptolemy XII Auletes, which means “flute-player”) was in some serious trouble. When Rome conquered his brother’s kingdom of Cyprus, Ptolemy XII famously did – and said – nothing. This silence proved unpopular among the local Egyptians. But Ptolemy XII’s excessive taxes were even less popular.

Ptolemy XII Auletes: Cleo’s pappy and consummate fuck-up.

Ptolemy XII needed to raise those taxes to pay back his Roman creditors. Among those creditors was Gaius Rabirius Postumus, who had sunk a huge chunk of his family fortune into Ptolemy’s debt obligations, hoping for a massive return once the Egyptian king got his shit together and stabilized his rule. But that wasn’t going to happen. The Roman debt drove the taxes, which angered a mob already enraged about his political capitulation to the Roman foreigners. The Egyptian people had had enough. They stormed the palace and the king ran off to Rome with his soon-to-be-famous daughter, Cleopatra. His other daughter, Berenice IV, took the Egyptian throne.

In Rome, Pompey housed Ptolemy XII and the cute-as-a-button Cleopatra. Pompey stood up in the senate house, decrying the unfairness of Ptolemy’s exile. After all, he was a friend of Rome who kept his mouth shut about Cyprus. He should be reinstated, by force if necessary.

What Cleopatra almost certainly looked like.

But the senate was well aware of what was going on. The Pompey faction was dumb enough to lend Ptolemy huge sums of money, and they lost that bet. In the senate’s mind, it was tough nuggets. They would not spill Roman blood to reinstate a king whose poor judgment and sloppy accounting had gotten his dumb ass kicked out of Egypt. It was all a ploy to claw back their investment losses, and that’s not good enough. The senate house filled with a resounding NO.

This did not sit well with young Rabirius. Pompey could afford the losses but Rabirius and his fellow back-benchers were ruined. Rabirius pleaded with Pompey to come up with some kind of solution. There must be a way to get Ptolemy XII back on the throne and get the tax revenue rolling again. Pompey had an idea…

Back in the old days when Pompey was fighting the pirates on the Mediterranean, there was a very skillful and discreet commander named Aulus Gabinius. The two men saw eye-to-eye on most things, and like most men in Pompey’s orbit, Gabinius was a very ambitious fellow. Pompey drew up a plan for a bit of mercenary warfare in Egypt. He convinced Ptolemy to pay Gabinius 10,000 talents to bankroll a mercenary army. This was illegal, but by keeping his own money out of the equation, Pompey had some plausible deniability.

Gabinius put together his private invasion force, which included a young commander named Marc Antony – a man who would one day return to Egypt in a big way. The Roman mercenaries sailed to Egypt and sacked Alexandria. Berenice IV surrendered the palace and begged for her father’s mercy. Ptolemy took back his throne and had Berenice and all her entourage executed. The dust settled and commander Marc Antony was introduced to the 14-year-old Cleopatra. But that romance would have to wait. Marc Antony had big things happening in Rome, so he sailed home.

Gabinius’ men would stay on in Alexandria to enforce Roman support of Ptolemy XII, and they became known as the Gabiniani. (These 2500 soldiers went native pretty quickly and would one day support Ptolemy’s son, the adolescent Ptolemy XIII, against Julius Caesar in the fight to place Cleopatra on the throne.)

Marc Antony during his stint as a drunk Welshman.

Anyway, now that Ptolemy XII was back in charge, the problem of his debts still remained. Gaius Rabirius Postumus was particularly pushy about it. He sent endless letters demanding payment. Ptolemy responded with claims of poverty. The treasury was bare. The best the king could do was IOU’s and promises. This did not sit well with the frustrated Rabirius. He took his complaints to Pompey the Great, who told the young upstart to work something out with Ptolemy. Pompey had done what he promised to do; the rest was up to Rabirius.

To shut up his annoying Roman creditor, Ptolemy made Rabirius an offer: come to Egypt and serve as the Minister of Finance. Surely the smart young Roman would have no problem levying taxes and maybe skimming a bit off the top to make back those losses. Rabirius knew nothing about national finance, but this was the only path offered to restore his fortune, so he accepted.

Rabirius sailed to Alexandria and got to work. He wanted his money back ASAP so the first thing he did was ramp up taxation toot sweet. It had apparently not occurred to him that this same greedy behavior had caused the overthrow of the king, but Rabirius probably figured that Ptolemy got the boot because of his political alliance with Rome, not because of taxes. And now that the Gabiniani were ensconced in Alexandria, he didn’t have to worry about any more citizen revolts.

So the taxes went up and up, and Rabirius skimmed off the top with wild abandon. He wanted to rebuild his lost investment as quickly as humanly possible and he assumed the Gabiniani would guarantee his authority to do so. He was wrong.

Within a year, there was another massive citizen revolt. The Gabiniani were unable or unwilling to suppress it. Ptolemy, being a wily fellow, knew the people had no love for Romans so he pointed the finger of blame directly at Rabirius. What the king didn’t expect was an armed attack on the treasury. He moved quickly to put Rabirius in a prison cell to save him from the angry mob.

We don’t need your steenking taxes!

The king calmly informed the mob that Rabirius would go on trial like any other criminal. But the king was also keenly aware that if Rabirius was convicted and executed, his other Roman creditors would go ballistic and he may even lose the support of Rome. So in late autumn, he had Rabirius released from prison and secreted aboard a ship bound for Rome.

Back in Rome, Gaius Rabirius Postumus was an unhappy camper. He escaped Alexandria with his life, but he still lost a huge chunk of his fortune. Being an irascible fellow, he started complaining at the senate house. He used what little authority he had as a senator and friend of Pompey to whip up support for his selfish cause. After all, how could Rome allow this Greek sometimes-king to insult and cheat a senator of Rome?

This was not a smart move.

Pompey’s enemies got wind of Rabirius’ whining and put it all together. Despite the fact that the mercenary restoration of Ptolemy was illegal, it was successful. One would be hard pressed to condemn Pompey for winning yet another successful campaign, even if it was illegal. The people wouldn’t have it. But a Roman senator bilking a province? That was a crime, albeit selectively enforced. They decided to enforce it.

Rabirius getting his ass handed to him.

Gaius Rabirius Postumus was duly accused of De Repetundis, also known as extortion. Roman governors often engaged in extortion (if not wholesale theft) when they ruled a province. But if the governor’s greed led to instability, they were sometimes accused of De Repetundis. The penalty was usually a harsh fine, and sometimes exile. Like his adoptive father before him, Gaius Rabirius Postumus was in a world of shit.

Rather than gaining sympathy from the Roman senate, Rabirius now faced a serious charge. And there was only one man who could get him out of it: Marcus Tullius Cicero. By this time Cicero was truly renown. To hire him was to win your case. He was that good. Like his father before him, Rabirius needed the sharp mind of Rome’s greatest orator to get his dumb ass out of the soup.

But Rabirius had a problem: money. He had very little left. So he leaned on his wife, Rabiria Demaris. Her family was rich as hell. Surely they could help? And they did. Cicero got his payment and took the job. His defense of Rabirius was strikingly similar to his defense of the elder Rabirius, and it also survives to this day as “Pro Rabirio Postumo”. In it, he re-frames Rabirius as a hapless, rash fellow who was merely doing his best to secure his assets as any man would. There’s plenty of “who among us?” interrogatories and obfuscations. It was another piece of Ciceronian legal theater and it worked like a charm.

Cicero defends another Rabirius.

It is not known if Gaius Rabirius Postumus ever got his fortune restored. But he did get aquitted, and he did build a lovely memorial for himself, his wife, and his newly adopted Egyptian goddess on the Via Appia Antica. It’s hard to prove, but I suspect part of Rabirius’ penance was to accept Isis as the family god. He surely had no love for Egypt, so it seems likely the adoption of Isis was forced upon him.

Regardless, the memorial still stands on the Appia Antica for all to see. Tourists take snapshots, but few have ever heard of him and even fewer know his story. Gaius Rabirius Postumus may have been a footnote in Roman history, but around him swirled the timeless stories of mighty ancients like Pompey, Cicero, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Ptolemy, and Cleopatra. He was a player in the game at a moment in history when a thriving republic became an unapologetic empire.

Next time you are in Rome, rent a bike and head down the Appia Antica. Just past the Via Degli Eugenii is a monument to the Rabirii. Stop and take a look. There is the face of a man who, though a fool and a scoundrel, was a moving cog in the machine that built western civilization.

]]>My Favorite Boring Thinghttp://citizented.com/?p=2563
Wed, 28 Jun 2017 04:55:30 +0000http://citizented.com/?p=2563When you’re young, anything short of a bikini-clad supermodel firing off an RPG into a Lamborghini is ultra-boring. Everything from your food (blue fruit roll-ups) to your clothes (yellow trousers) to your music (anything that rattles windows) has to be absolutely thrilling.

What an exciting movie may look like.

When you get older, boring things start to become interesting. It starts small with gateway boring things like capers and Bergman films. Before you know it, you’re reading Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” and listening to Stravinsky. At this point, it’s all over for you. You enjoy boring things and there is no going back.

Now, I’m not talking about universally boring things like waiting in an airport or sitting through Sunday mass. I’m talking about boring things that millions of adults find absolutely riveting. There is only one defense for your favorite boring things: your boring things are much, much more interesting than other people’s boring things.

To that end, here are boring things that I find totally boring:

Golf.

Symphony no2 in Dmaj by Johannes Brahms.

Frozen yogurt.

Now that I’ve outraged thousands of readers, it’s only fair that I come clean with boring things I really enjoy:

Tarkovsky films.

Roman history.

Black eyed peas.

But of all the boring things I enjoy, the most boring yet beloved of them all is…snooker.

How I view a thrilling evening.

It’s hard to explain. This British billiards game is inscrutable to those who don’t know the rules and dreadfully boring to those who do. Despite its popularity in the UK and China, snooker has become a by-word for boring television.

So how can I possibly enjoy snooker?

Because there’s something devilish about it. Unlike most billiards games, snooker isn’t about potting balls in pockets. That’s only half the game. The other half is leaving the cue ball in a hopeless position for your opponent – snookering them. In fact, a good snooker will thrill the crowd like a well-potted ball. It’s the gall of it that makes me smile.

There’s something universally appealing about snooker. Just like every other sport, it’s human agency pushing against entropy to gain an advantage. It’s about precision and cleverness. And of course, luck. Like Fast Eddie said in The Color of Money: “The balls roll funny for everybody, kiddo.” You can do everything right, and sometimes you get hosed. You can do everything wrong and still pull off a home run.

So: since you people made me sit through boring shit like Phish concerts and Iron Man 3, you can sit back while I wax poetic about snooker.

Let’s begin.

This is the snooker table. To win, you pot balls to get the most points. Red balls are 1 point, and the other colored balls are shown with their point values. To score points, you must pot a red ball, then a colored ball, then a red ball, then a colored ball, etc. The red balls stay sunk, but colored balls are retrieved and placed back in their position on the table. You keep potting red balls and colored balls until there are no more red balls left on the table. At that point, you must sink all the colored balls in order: yellow, green, brown, blue, pink, black.

Simple, eh? Well, snooker tables are huge – 12ft by 6ft. Their pockets are very narrow. And the felt is fast as hell. The table is merciless. There is no room for error. This isn’t your local barroom table. Potting a ball on a snooker table is really damn hard. There are no easy shots. But that doesn’t even cover the best part.

When it’s your turn to play, you MUST make contact with a red ball. If you pot it, good for you. You MUST then make contact with a colored ball. If you sink it, hooray. But you MUST at least contact your object ball. If you hit the wrong ball or miss your object ball, your opponent gets points. So, if you cannot easily pot your object ball, you are best served making contact with it, then leaving the cue ball somewhere that utterly screws over your opponent: snooker them. (And yes: that’s where we get the term “I’ve been snookered!” when someone cheats you out of something.)

Snookered. Big time.

In the above image, our hero has already potted a red ball. He is now required to at least contact (if not pot) a colored ball. He CANNOT contact a red ball first. Look at him. He’s fucked. There’s no way he’s going to contact any colored ball. But he has to. These are the moments that make snooker great. Not because someone scored huge points or did something graceful. No. In snooker, you achieve greatness by making your opponent’s life hell.

People who enjoy snooker are looking for three things from a great player: the ability to pot balls, the ability to snooker their opponents into oblivion, and the ability to maintain their cool under immense pressure.

It’s as thrilling as pitching that final out, kicking that game-winning field goal, or defending the net as time runs out.

Snooker is awesome.

FUCK YEAH SNOOKER IS AWESOME!

So there you have it: my favorite boring thing. – snooker. Yeah, I sometimes fall asleep watching it. But more often I am glued to the screen, watching every brilliant pot, every fiendish snooker, every smirk from the vanquished foe. My boring thing is way better than your boring thing. :0)

And I return with Great News! Back in 2011, I formed Nihilists for the GOP (NGOP), a SuperPAC dedicated to the utter destruction of American life. It was our fervent belief that the United States needed to be brought low so it may one day rise again: newer, better, stronger. The endless see-saw between incompetent Republican leadership and band-aid Democratic fixes was leaving our country in the doldrums.

Suddenly, a ray of hope appeared. The GOP was invaded by a virus known as the Tea Party. This modern version of the Know-Nothings morphed the GOP from a party of cynical corporate lackeys into a party of demented extremist morons. The NGOP saw opportunity here. But we had no idea how well it would actually work. How well?

Venal. Stupid. Ignorant. PERFECT.

“How does this help?”, you ask? More likely: “WHAT IN THE FUCKING HELL ARE YOU BABBLING ABOUT?”, you ask?

It’s like this: western democracies are prone to fascism. Fascists aren’t always goose-stepping crazies in leather uniforms. Fascists are often happy friendly smiley people in three-piece suits. But fascism is a road to self-destruction. Like its doppelganger authoritarian-communism, fascism is a monster that devours itself and leaves in its wake misery and death.

How can we avoid this fate? WE DON’T.

Two of the greatest regional democracies on Earth are Japan and Germany. Remember them? After a few decades of fascist blundering, they were utterly destroyed by the sane forces of the Allies. Most importantly: from the ashes rose two nations dedicated to regional stability and civil rights. Not only did they rise; they flourished.

Tokyo 1945 Tokyo today. Notice anything?

Berlin 1945 Berlin today. Any questions?

Back in 2011, the NGOP advocated electing idiotic, amoral, deranged psychopaths like Rick Santorum and Sarah Palin. We assumed they could ably lead us directly into the toilet bowl. We had NO IDEA there would appear on the horizon a candidate so fabulously dumb, so superlatively incompetent, so mindlessly depraved, that all the others would have to bow down to his Supreme Imbecility. NOW WE HAVE THAT MAN.

The Leader of the Free World openly mocking a disabled person.

The NGOP was surprised, to say the least.

You see: we have long ago given up on the dream that America would follow the rest of the civilized world. Our initial fear that Bernie Sanders would win the candidacy and help America join the ranks of sane societies was gleefully dashed by the arrogant forces at the helm of the Democratic party. Always eager to to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the party leadership sunk the USS Sanders and slapped a coat of paint on the tired old battleship Clinton.

Initially, we thought this misstep might actually work. To our delight, we were wrong. She lost big-time.

The president of the United States is a monumentally stupid fascist. To his credit (and our delight), he doesn’t hide it. He REVELS in it, as do his followers.

This is the beginning of the end of America’s unstable flirtation with sort-of-in, sort-of-out fascism. We are now ALL IN.

Sit back and watch the descent. We can’t say exactly what form America’s fall will take, but if we were betting men we’d put some serious cash down on a severe recession, alienation from all our allies, and enough civil strife to choke all areas of public order. In the end, from the ashes of a devastated nation shall rise a new America. Like a parent attending a child who has fallen off his bike and skinned his knee, our allies will be there for us in the end. They shall teach us their ways, and in a few decades we will realize our full potential.

Until then, hold on to your fucking seats because the ride’s about to get very bumpy indeed.

I’ve already posted four previous articles wherein I brilliantly solve some of the world’s most complicated conundrums. Today, I will solve a problem that has plagued every democracy in the world for centuries: the question of capital punishment.

This is all a bit untoward, what?

Capital punishment has been employed since the advent of civilization. When someone commits a crime that marks them as a mortal threat to a community, the only options are complete forgiveness (dangerous), banishment (possible repercussions), imprisonment (costly) or execution (barbarous but effective). Execution became wildly popular because it served two sociological purposes: it rid the community of a mortal danger and it wreaked vengeance for those affected, be they community members or the State itself.

When the world emerged from the horrors of world war in the 20th century, many nations banned capital punishment. It was all too clear how dangerous it was to trust the State with the option of executing its own citizenry. The Western world was quick to ban it. Today in the West, only Belarus and the United States continue to enforce capital crimes. Much of Africa and Asia continue to employ it, including the otherwise pacific people of Japan.

Gosh, look how civilized we are!

I’ve read a few books on the subject, but I won’t bother recounting the moral aspects of the various methods of execution. Instead, I will forward a policy designed to bridge the gap between capital punishment supporters and critics.

2) That capital punishment is a just vengeance for survivors of a capital murder;

3) That the State can’t be trusted to fairly enforce capital punishment;

4) That capital punishment is morally reprehensible.

In a nutshell, my plan is the following: remove the power to execute from the State and deliver it to the People as a civil matter. Sound crazy? Then let’s get on with the crazy!

Meet our murderers:John Smith………………………………….Hank Jones

While every criminal case is different, for my purposes I wish to delineate first degree murder cases into two categories: those based on circumstantial evidence and those based on indisputable evidence. John Smith (not his real name) was arrested after his wife was found dead. Police found forensic evidence at the crime scene and on his person that linked him to the crime. Hank Jones (not his real name) was in a public place and, in front of dozens of witnesses, shot to death three people in an effort to murder a man who he mistakenly believed had cheated him of $60.

Right now, lawyers are already angry with me, as “every case has its details and merits” and “you can’t just categorize so broadly”. But yea, I think I can. So stay with me for a bit.

Let’s assume both men were found mentally fit to stand trial for first degree murder. Both men were convicted of the charges. There are families that want to see these men dead. And there are attorneys who disagree on the particulars of these trials and harbor continued concerns about the convictions. People are calling for The Chair. Others are calling for clemency. What to do? Here’s what I think.

My primary concern is the same of all the other Western democracies: the State cannot be trusted to enforce capital punishment fairly. Liberals, Conservatives and Libertarians should all agree on this point. Hell, we don’t feel the State fairly enforces parking regulations, much less the decision to execute its own citizens! We all know that prosecutors are tasked to convict every clown that shows up in the dock to the furthest extent of the law. They build careers on this. They are not obliged to be merciful. And they have been historically unconcerned about having prosecuted innocent people. Shit happens, right?

Well, when your zeal leads to an innocent man being executed, you have crossed a line that most civilized nations find unacceptable.

So, since the State cannot be trusted to fairly enforce the power of executing its own citizenry, we are left looking at the other side of the coin. Does society have a vested interest in seeing a convicted murderer executed?

We can take care of this ourselves, right pardner?

I would faithfully submit that every competent study on capital punishment (in America) shows a negligible effect as a deterrent. That just isn’t how murderers think. If it’s not a crime of passion, it’s a crime of single-minded cruelty and vengeance. Pro’s and con’s aren’t being weighed. And that’s why we can’t afford to have these people running loose.

So, the deterrent argument is crap. That leaves us with the moral dimensions. Is it immoral? And should the survivors of a capital crime have the right to see their antagonist executed? Before you say “yes” and “no”, imagine this:

You’re an anti-capital punishment guy at a house party with your spouse, your two young daughters and seven friends. A guy bursts in with a gun and a bomb. He threatens to blow up the bomb if anybody moves. He proceeds to rape your daughters and forces you to watch. Then he shoots both girls to death as you watch. He has a big belly laugh and urinates on the corpses. He did it for fun, and he says you and your spouse are next. Just then, he is overpowered by the dinner guests. He is arrested, arraigned and convicted of two counts of first degree murder. In court, he leers at you and during conviction threatens to rape your spouse and kill both of you afterward. Your life is devastated. You can’t sleep. Your marriage crumbles. You think you are losing your mind. Through a confederate, this guy continues to send you death threats. He just won’t stop.

Do you now feel a need to have this guy executed? Maybe, maybe not. But the moral dimension has surely shifted. Life in prison without parole for this guy may not be enough for you.

Step 1: weight of the evidence.

Let’s look at my plan now.

To begin, I would remove from the State its ability to sentence anyone to death. Life without parole would be the toughest sentence possible. In most cases, and in most civilized countries, this is the end of it. The State is now charged with dealing with this person.

I must stress that according to American law, this person was convicted because they were found guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Reasonable doubt has been a legal football kicked by attorneys for many decades across untold criminal cases, but it remains the Law of the Land. It is perhaps purposefully vague, yet we still observe it.

So, the State can find someone guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. However, that standard does not apply in civil cases. The preponderance of evidence is weighed by a civil judge, and that judge’s decision can be appealed. In most cases, the standards of evidence in civil trials is something less strict than “beyond a reasonable doubt”. It’s a weaker standard. Since execution is irrevocable, any legal standard to execute someone must go the other direction: it must have a substantially higher standard of evidence.

You are hereby remanded to a private execution service!

I would submit that in the case of first degree murder, any person who can show direct damage from the defendant’s actions can lobby a civil court to have that person executed, but with the following caveats:

1) The civil court must find that the evidence leading to conviction was not just “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but that the evidence reached a higher standard that I call “overwhelming and compelling”.

2) If this civil court finds the defendant was convicted with evidence that was “overwhelming and compelling”, the plaintiff can ask the court to remand the defendant to a private facility at the plaintiff’s cost.

3) The defendant can appeal the civil decision.

4) If the appeals fail, the defendant is remanded to a private institution and a fixed date of execution is set. This date cannot be delayed or forwarded.

5) At the private institution, the staff arrange for the defendant to be executed in a manner determined to be neither cruel nor unusual.

6) At the proscribed moment, the plaintiff performs the action that causes the execution to occur.

7) After the execution occurs, the defendant’s family or representatives reserve the right to sue for wrongful death should evidence arise that counters the “overwhelming and compelling” evidence that caused the civil execution case to move forward.

I think this recourse solves the many conflicting aspects of capital punishment. It removes the State from responsibility and places it firmly in the hands of the plaintiffs (the aggrieved party). It filters out defendants who were convicted with less-than-overwhelming evidence. It places a substantial personal and financial burden on the aggrieved party. It causes execution to become personal and extremely rare.

In my estimation, the vast majority of capital cases will be reduced to Life Without Parole. Only the Worst of the Worst will become truly capital cases. And even if a bloodthirsty plaintiff insists on pleading to a Civil Execution court, they remain on the hook for a potential counter-suit. Only the most passionate of the aggrieved will bother.

This will likely result in an effective abolition of capital punishment, but (importantly) it does not remove the concept from public consciousness. We can still consider ourselves to be tough on crime. Yet we will no longer be a nation that lets the State do our killing for us. That is a dangerous policy and my plan solves it.

So, unless you are willing to hound your murderer to the very end of the legal rope, and unless you are willing to do the killing by your own hand, you need to suck it up and accept Life Without Parole as the best possible outcome.

As for the private execution services? I’m sure Halliburton could come up with something.

When Apple released the MacBook Air in 2008, there was a very curious omission in the design: the computer had no optical drive. No CD, no DVD. Sure, you could opt to purchase an external CD/DVD drive, but by purposefully omitting the drive, Apple made a bold statement: “We don’t think there’s any future in optical media.”

Microsoft fanboys and crotchety old coots like me howled in disbelief. After all, we had accumulated massive libraries of software applications, games, music and movies on optical media. What good is a new computer if I can’t put my ancient copy of Cubase on it? And what if I need to burn a music mix onto a CD to give to some chick in an effort to show her how cool and sensitive I am? And what if I need to burn an ISO of a cool program or DVD that I just pirated from the torrents? What about DVD backups of my prOn collection? Hmm? Is Apple crazy?

Like usual, Apple was crazy like a fox.

Go ahead. Live the life!

In the intervening years, optical media started to disappear like like cupcakes in Adele’s pantry. Valve’s Steam download service became the go-to method of obtaining new games and in recent months they have started offering direct downloads of mainstream software applications as well. Netflix and other streaming services obviated the need to collect a bunch of plastic disks of your favorite movies and TV shows. Most folks download “apps” instead of full-fledged programs, and most major developers offer pay download services rather than disks. And music? Who buys CD’s any more? Your grampa?

Media storage has never been cheaper. Terabyte drives, home-based NAS file servers and even cheap USB memory sticks serve the vast majority of people as viable back up systems. You can even back up your stuff to “the cloud”, if you trust corporations to be hands-off with your sensitive files.

It seems Apple was right. Optical media is going the way of the floppy disk. But before we start digging its grave, we should consider the ramifications of our actions.

Physical media comes in many forms.

Before we go flying off into the Fantastic World of Tomorrow, we need to slow down and assess what we’re doing. Ever since Julius Caesar, Aurelian and the Christian Patriarchy took turns burning down the Library at Alexandria, we have to ask ourselves: how can we save our works for posterity?

How many of Edison’s cylinders were ever converted to vinyl? How many vinyl masters and tapes were ever encoded to a CD? And how many CD’s have been ripped to MP3 or similar formats? How much music was lost forever in this endless process of media evolution? What have we lost?

I submit to you the following: we have lost a lot. From early 20th century bluegrass to moldering silent films to wacky girlie magazines of the 1960’s, in our headlong rush for the new we are leaving behind the gemstones of civilization. This is all due to the vagaries of physical media. If we could digitize this stuff with the highest degree of granularity possible, future generations will merely have to perform the comparatively easy task of trans-coding to more modern formats.

Errol Flynn’s first film “Murder at Monte Carlo” – gone forever.

Wikipedia has a list of lost films. It is far from comprehensive. Only 10% of silent films and early talkies have survived. Of the golden age of film-making (1927-1950), about half are lost forever. Sure, some of those films were boring. But they all contain at least a grain of insight into the minds of the people that created them and the society that watched them. I’m sure a lot of the scrolls in the Library at Alexandria were pretty damn boring, but civilization is far poorer for their loss.

The Library of Congress and similar organizations are making efforts to preserve as much of this stuff as they can. In fact, the next time somebody tells you that everything the government does is worthless and wasteful, do point them to the Library of Congress website. Then ask them to please continue droning on.

Is it enough? No. Optical media is on its deathbed. It’s up to you, the hoarder of CD’s and unpopular DVD’s, to start a digital library of your stuff and start sharing it. That’s right: share it. The copyright nags are the enemy of civilization. For them, there is a dollar value on the scrolls at Alexandria. They insist that society and culture should move forward only at the pace that provides them maximum financial return. Disney is the enemy, not PirateBay.

The Internet is much more than a series of tubes. It is the first ever repository of human knowledge which has an amazing aspect: the ability to reproduce perfectly, endlessly. But if it isn’t in there, it won’t be out there. To that end, I give you Rudy Vallee singing “My Song” from 1925. After all, he wanted you to hear his song!

All my pretty speeches are a bustAnd so I must try something new.I’ve been sitting up the whole night longWriting a song all about you.I don’t care if it’s a big success;As long as it will change your ‘no’ to ‘yes’…

Chorus:My song won’t appeal to a lover of art.My song will reveal what I feel in my heart.It won’t have so much of Franz Schubert’s touch.And I can’t begin like Irving Berlin.

My song, though a poet would never OK,My song, still you know what I’m striving to say.My words may be crude; the tune may be wrong,But you’ll find my heart in my song.

When I was a kid, I watched every cheesy 1950’s horror movie broadcast in the New York City area. Some of them gave me a mild chill while others scared the living crap out of me. One of them, Fiend Without a Face, fed my nightmares for years. It was about malevolent aliens composed of human brains and spinal cords who were rendered invisible by radioactivity. To this day I try to avoid disembodied nervous systems.

But of all the aliens, monsters, vampires and zombies, the movies that struck me to my core were ghost stories. Why? Ghosts don’t have fangs or claws. They rarely even physically harm anyone. But they stir a primal fear in us. Their mere appearance drives us into paroxysms of horror.

They’re here.

Ghost stories evolved in the modern era, with Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist becoming the high water mark in the genre. Now in full color with full gore, we had connected our historical fascination of ghosts with scientific certainty. Kooks and crackpots exalted and filled bookshelves with ridiculous claims and silly narratives (many of which were read by young library visitors in New Jersey) .

Having matured into a Man of Science, I reject all those silly theories and spine-chilling stories. Yet somehow, I still maintain a nagging fear when I convince myself that somewhere in the darkness a phantasm awaits. Why is this?

I returned to my library books of yore and discovered something quite profound: ghosts are the inevitable manifestation of our warmth for nostalgia. They are the impossible past leaping forward to invade our present. They are deeply personal reflections of our foibles and regrets. This is far more terrifying than the external threat of tooth and claw. Let’s look back on the history of ghosts, then we’ll wrap it up with some observations about modern ghost stories.

Ancient Babylonians had some serious ghost problems.

Ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt had ghosts galore. The spirits of the Dead sometimes languished among the Living and affected their lives. Back then, ghosts weren’t very malevolent. The Roman writer Cicero told the story of Simonides, who buried a stranger’s body he had chanced upon. To return the favor of a proper burial, the dead man’s ghost appeared before Simonides and warned him not to board a ship he was scheduled to sail upon. Simonides took the ghost’s advice and that ship later sank at sea. Thanks, Mr. Ghost!

Pliny the Younger maintained the “unburied dead” concept when he wrote about a house in Athens haunted by a ghost who terrorized the homeowners until a chained skeleton was located beneath the house and properly buried. Ghosts regularly appeared in Homer’s epics, appearing with spine-shivering regularity and delivering warnings that our heroes would ignore at their peril.

Boo!

The Christian era buried the Pagan Gods but retained the myth of ghosts. On the third day after Christ’s interment, the stone was rolled away and Jesus walked out in his burial shroud. His followers immediately freaked out. It’s a ghost! It took some convincing from the risen Christ to convince them he was not a malingering phantom but actually a supernatural manifestation of God, leaving now to take a seat at the right hand of the Father.

Phew! Glad that all got sorted out!

The Roman Catholic church taught that the spirits of the Dead ascended to Heaven, fell into Hell or were held in indefinite limbo in Purgatory. There was no canon for disembodied spirits to walk the Earth, so the Church assumed any such apparition was surely a demon. And thus began the Western tradition of ghosts as malevolent monsters, usually in league with witches. They caused crops to fail and damned villages. This led to some rather unsavory public policies among European and American societies. Thousands of men and women were burned alive in the quest to stamp out the effects of demonic spirits.

But the ghosts that haunted my dreams were those popularized in the Victorian era. They terrorized us without engaging in murder or slaughter. Their very appearance was their stock in trade: “Malevolence and terror, the glare of evil faces, the stony grin of unearthly malice.” They caused such fear that otherwise sane individuals would go utterly mad and require incarceration in an asylum.

Forevermore!

Edgar Allen Poe became the poet laureate of the spectral apparition. With Gothic pen in hand, he scribbled stories of vengeful spirits haunting the nights of the Living, marking their lives with reproach and guilt. Once again, these phantasms didn’t attack our protagonists with murderous rage. Instead, Poe used vivid descriptions of defiled corpses and eldritch estates to invoke a sense of dread. The ghosts were the inevitable manifestations of our uncertainty about shadows flickering down the hall and odd bumps in the night. The Divine Edgar knew what struck fear in the hearts of the Victorians and he exploited it for all it was worth.

Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian eras, writers continued frightening readers with tales of lurid pasts coming awake to haunt us. From Lord Dunsany to HP Lovecraft, the spectral world was forever reaping the harvest that foolish men had sown.

Cashing in on the craze.

Of course, it wasn’t just Victorian writers making a living from the Dead. An entire industry of “spirit mediums” sprang up, promising to bridge the gap between fictional ghost stories and our everyday lives. For a fee, of course. These charlatans and delusional eccentrics understood the effect of ghosts on the primal consciousness of the average citizen as well as Poe did. The cultural descendents of these con artists continue to operate today.

Yet somehow the lore of the ghost has fallen out of favor in modern times, replaced with rotting zombies and vampires who go to high school. The “Poltergeist” and “Amityville” films renewed the ghost myth in popular culture, but even the laudable “Ring” films were a drop in the bucket of blockbuster werewolf, vampire and zombie outings. A recent series of laughably stupid television programs and “Paranormal” ghost movies continue to exploit our preternatural fear of ghosts, but modern viewers want blood and guts, not bumps in the night.

Modern horror films are less cerebral.

We can attribute this to our truncated attention spans and less-than-introspective lifestyles. If a spy film has no car chase, Hollywood won’t back it. If a horror film has no gore in it, independent studios won’t back it. The days of Vincent Price raising a sharp eyebrow as a clinking noise echoes through a Bavarian castle are long gone.

Surprisingly, it the ghost myth that is most likely to frighten the average person in the night. We don’t assume that creaking noise or muffled footfall is a vampire or a werewolf. Or even a zombie. Instead, we brace ourselves for the possibility that a ghost is in our midst. We squint into the darkness and cast our eyes quickly over our shoulders. Did I just see something? Was that a shadow? How did it move? What is out there? “Hello! Is anybody out there?”

We aren’t calling out to find a person. We are calling out to dispel a ghost. Whether we are successful or not – that is the question. Because if we are not, then we will certainly be faced with a spectral mirage of someone long dead. It may not physically harm us, but it cannot be killed and it cannot be wished away. It has an agenda. And it has nothing to fear, while we have everything to fear.

There’s plenty of bad design out there. There’s plenty of ergonomic what-the-fucks. The “tear here to open” that rips apart. The child-safety cap that requires the patience of Job and the strength of a gorilla to open. Today I’d like to share some of my gripes about these every day problems.

The Corporate Bathroom Towel Dispenser

Go ahead. Make my day.

These crappy things have been dumping armloads of extra paper towels onto the wet floor since the 1950’s. You pull to get a towel and the weight of the others makes it rip. So you tug, thus releasing a torrent of unwanted towels. And let’s not forget the people that leave a half-torn towel stuck in the dispenser so you have to pry and pull with your wet soggy hands just to get the failed process going all over again.

And don’t get me started on the motion-sensor dispensers. They make us look like a bunch of desperate, wet-handed mimes performing Vaudeville at the Moulin Rouge.

Short Faucets

You’ll never get all the soap off, loser!

The reason you’re reaching for the lousy towel dispenser is because you just washed your hands in a bathroom sink with a tiny faucet. In order to get your giant mitts clean, you have to mush them up against the back wall of the sink just to get some clean water flowing over them. Is it really too costly to get a faucet that reaches a few inches further? I guess it is.

One Function Shower Control

We got hot, we got cold. What else you want?

These things are common in hotels. Trouble is, we never really know what THIS place thinks hot or warm or cold really means, or how long it might take for the hot water to fully kick in. Worst of all, you have no flow control. You get ON-COLD, ON-HOT and OFF. Notice how OFF is the at the far end of HOT, so to shut it off you must first scald your head with boiling water.

I understand why hotels need to control water use, but I’d like them to offer two types of rooms: one for people who can manually adjust two faucet controls and one for the morons.

Low-Flow Toilet

I ain’t flushing that thing. Sorry. Not my problem.

I’m as a big a hippie as any other. I believe in conserving resources and recycling and being nice to the Earth. But I draw the line at low-flow toilets that fail to accomplish their primary mission. I don’t care what the tag says at the store, these things cannot flush man-size turds at all. There’s no point in being “low-flow” when it takes two or three flushes and a stick from the backyard to get the job done. Fuck that. Give me a 5-gallon turbo-action Turd Destroyer. I’m so glad you can still find them at the re-use store.

Coffee Makers

One cup? Two? Five? Spin the wheel and get a big surprise!

If you want an American-style cup of coffee, be sure to use one of these pieces of crap. Don’t pay too much attention to the fact that the two water calibration lines don’t correlate or that the coffee packet doesn’t really say how much you should use. Just shove the coffee in the bin, fill up the trough with water and pray to whatever God you prefer. You are almost guaranteed to get either feather-light dishwater or sludge from the bottom of an oil barrel. Either way, it will be piping hot, so you’ve got that going for you.

Round Doorknobs

I am all there is!

Yes, door knobs! Why did we North Americans fill our homes with these lousy things? You have to have a lizard grip, supple shoulders and an awkward elbow to pull open every door in the house. These things are poorly designed for the job: causing a latch bolt to retreat. In most homes in Europe, they’ve evolved to the lever push-down handle. It’s easy, it’s reliable, it doesn’t loosen up and it applies great amounts of force with very little effort. Just one more thing those dirty Europeans got right.

Band-Aid Packets

I am the Devil and you are my slave!

So you just cut your finger. Blood is gushing out. You squeeze the wound closed with whatever rag was on hand. It seems to be slowing, so it’s time for a Band-Aid. But unless you have some decent fingernails and two hands free, you’re not gonna open that packet. And who has two hands free when they’re busy tending to a wound? And let’s not forget those worthless “pull string to open packet” systems they foisted upon us. That stupid red string would slip right out, leaving you with a closed packet, a bloody digit and a head full of fury.

One would think that with billions of dollars of profit, Johnson & Johnson could hire one engineer to solve the problem. But, no. If you don’t like it you can go ahead and bleed to death. See if anyone cares!

Digital Speedometers

Better watch it, Buster!

These things are stupid on several fronts. First and foremost: unlike an analog speedometer, they don’t tell you much about your acceleration or deceleration. These are good things to know when you’re – you know – driving. Next: it tempts people to glance endlessly at the speedo. 39…40…41…42…OMFG…41…40…39…OMFG! One mph here or there doesn’t mean anything. I want to see where I’m at every once in a while and if I’m accelerating I want to know what the rate is. Finally, these things are poorly solving a problem that didn’t exist. Nothing causes more waste than a marketing team director who “has a great new idea”.

STFU, Mr. Marketing Guy. Just put a speedo in there and let us move on with our lives.

Electric Stove Elements

Touch-a touch-a touch-a touch me! I wanna be burny!

I am plagued with these things. Precise temperature control is impossible. They are ugly as sin and collect drippings and crap, then burn them to uncleanable rusty globs. Disgusting. Worst of all, if you have oil in the pan there is no way to get an even spread because not one of your stove elements is level. Sure, you could prop one end up with tin foil but you’ll never get it right. It’ll just slosh in this direction and that. There is no hope. Give up.

I love these things. They’re a buck apiece and burn for many many hours. Trouble is, they tend to heat up, turning the candle liquid inside. When you blow it out it cools off and buries the wick. Now, when the power goes out you find yourself digging away at the wick in order to tease it out. And when you try to light it, it just won’t stay lit. It drowns itself in wax. So what seemed like an inexhaustible candle turns out to be a one-use waste of money.

Oh, and the photo above says “Ecce Homo”, which is Latin for “Behold the man”, which Pontius Pilate said when producing Christ for the crowd to mock. These candles are not saying Jesus was a homo. I hope we got that all straightened out.

Low Slung Deck Chairs

Go ahead. Sit down.

A descendent of the Kennedy Chair, which was in turn a variation of the Eisenhower Chair, the low-slung deck chair is the bane of the American patio. They look so cool and sleek and inviting, but once you’ve plopped your fat ass in there, you’re not getting back up. You can’t. So instead you give up and start barking commands at the wife and kids. “Get your old man a beer and another cheeseburger, would ya?”

Now that you’re drunk and full of greasy food, the likelihood you’ll ever stand up is gone for good. So you drift off into a nap. Later on, the wife wakes you to let you know the guests have all left and the kids are watching TV. You now have the excuse of post-nap lethargy to ask your wife to pull with all her might and get your fat ass out of that damn chair.

Next Sunday the whole process repeats. But damn – it looks so good on the patio, doesn’t it?

And finally…

Clock Radios

HA HA! Your career depends on me!

Probably the most lasting and egregious form of bad design, the ubiquitous digital clock radio is the biggest piece of shit ever foisted upon an unknowing world.

The various manufacturers have different schemes for making the various settings and none of these awful designs have improved on the plain old alarm clock. There are wind-up travel alarm clocks that have worked admirably for many decades. Until I lost mine, I’d bring it on trips because it was dead simple and totally reliable.

Nowadays, when you come rambling into your hotel room at 2am and need to set your clock to wake you up at 6:20 sharp, you’re screwed. You can barely focus your eyes on the tiny buttons and text, much less make the logical leaps required to perform the sequence for a reliable alarm. So you call down to the front desk for a wake up call that never comes because someone called in sick that day.

In July 2003, my friend John and I went on a an overnight trip to Spray Park, a flowery alpine area on the northwest flank of Mount Rainier. We went for the wildflowers, the glaciers and the beautiful landscape. Little did I know it would bring me face to face with mortal danger!

The hike in was wonderful. Clear skies and pleasant temperatures made the strenuous ascent a little easier. We passed up through the treeline, past waterfalls and alpine glory.

The requisite waterfall shot.

Eventually, we broke through the trees and found ourselves on the glaciated flanks of Mount Rainier. We were lucky to find a perfect campsite adjoining the glacier. We had a clear, flat area and access to water. We spent the evening shooting photos, playing songs on our kalimbas and watching the golden hour of sunset pass over the top of the world.

The night went by without incident, but John was taken ill. He caught some kind of nasty cold. The next morning, he put down some coffee and biscuits but informed me had no energy to continue up the mountain. There was a plaque at the top of Observation Rock (the rock jutting up on the right in the above photo). The exact elevation at that point is 8,364 feet and I thought it would be a cool idea to climb up there and see if my fancy new altimeter wristwatch was really accurate.

I would have to do it alone.

Approaching Echo Rock.

My plan was to head straight out of camp, then hug the glaciated area along the base of Echo Rock. I would then follow the gently rising slope in the upper center of this photo to Observation Rock. I wanted to hug Echo Rock because the ascent was easier and the shadowed area had firmer snow on it. Up I went.

Once I got to the shadowed area at the base of Echo Rock, they appeared…

MOUNTAIN GOATS!

A herd of mountain goats appeared over the scree above Observation Rock and headed right toward me! The digital zoom on my lousy camera could not do justice to the apprehensive atmosphere they created. They were marching right toward me!

Like most city folk, I wasn’t sure what the protocol was for dealing with mountain goats in the wild. Do you run? Do you puff out your chest and make noise? Do you climb a tree? What? I had no idea. So I just kept my mouth shut and hoped they’d walk past me. They didn’t.

Closer and closer they came!

They crossed the glacier and moved just above me. Here you can see the Alpha Goat regarding me with disdain. It was at this point things got really weird. The Alpha Goat bellowed to his flock: “Follow me! We will destroy this intruder!”

And so began the onslaught. These enormous beasts sidled past me and climbed up the scree above me on Echo Rock. At first I thought they would simply climb up and away from me. I was wrong.

Once the entire herd had mounted the scree, they started kicking rocks down onto me! I had to side step, duck and leap like a running back. Huge rocks bounced up all around me, many nearly clipping my head. I had nowhere to run. I backed off, but that’s where the rocks seemed to be landing. If I stayed forward, they mostly bounced over my head. And besides, I was afraid the whole herd would rush me if I ran.

An enraged goat grimaces at me mockingly.

I was unable to capture photos of the actual rocks flying at me because:

I was busy leaping, ducking and sidestepping.

I was in fear for my life.

Fuck the camera! I had bigger problems.

But I did pull out my camera a couple times to get fast, lousy photos of the goats. My hands were trembling, which didn’t help. However, I got a few more shots off. This one was the most shocking:

A baby goat forced into homicidal rage.

Most of the goats – about 15 of them – were kicking rocks down at me. But the baby mountain goat refused to engage in the cruelty. I continually moved below the baby goat because it was the safest place to be. Then, one of the goats ambled over to the baby and started head-butting it and bleating loudly at it. He was saying “Kick rocks at the human or consequences will be severe!”

To my horror, the baby goat complied and kicked a few small rocks at me! The rotten turncoat bastard!

An angry goat sizes me up closely.

The cavalcade of scree started to slow down. I had evaded their reign of terror. The goats now knew I was made of sterner stuff than they had expected. As the rock attack abated, I got off one more “angry goat” photo and started backing away slowly.

To my relief, the herd dismounted the scree just above me and started back up the glacier, curving out and around Echo Rock.

I stood victorious as the failed assassination broke up and the goats fled.

I took some very long breaths that morning as the goats gave up and headed back up the glacier. I didn’t know it, but far below my friend John was watching the whole thing from his telephoto lens. He was prepared to mount up and haul me off if I had gotten beaned by a big rock. I was in good shape back in 2003 and my 20-mile-a-week jogging habit had served me well. The five aspects of fitness: strength-endurance-speed-balance-flexibity. You need all five at times like these!

Off they go in search of a weaker human.

After they were gone, I took a few minutes to collect myself. I was uninjured, but I was still a bit shaky. I sat down on a rock and looked across the glacier. Just ahead was Observation Rock. The whole damn point was to climb up that stupid rock and I wasn’t about to turn around now. Not after all this shit.

I decided to get my act together and scamper up the rock.

Observation Rock beckons!

The hike across the glacier and up the rock was uneventful. But once at the top, I found I was not alone. Two Irishmen – Fergil and Tim – who were touring the North Cascades had been up there for some time. They offered me hot tea and snacks, which I greedily consumed.

Fergil sorts his gear.

I didn’t mention anything about the recent incident. Instead, I mentioned my cool new altimeter watch. I needed to see the plaque and see if the numbers matched. We jumped over to the plaque and I was pleasantly surprised to see that my watch was only off by about 10 feet. My sea-level calibrations had proved accurate!

We all sat down and quietly enjoyed the day when Fergil finally mentioned, with typical Irish understatement, “Bit o’ goat trouble back there, eh?”

I smiled. “Yeah”.

Then we all broke up laughing. They had watched the whole thing from Observation Rock. Apparently, I looked like a real fool jumping, ducking and sidestepping the goat rock attack. Yeah, laugh it up. It’s different when it’s your ass on the line against an enraged baby goat!

The boys and I loaded up. They were heading around the west of the mountain and I was heading down. They took a photo of me and we went our separate ways.

A rare photo of your humble narrator in the wild.

John was glad to see me back at camp. I told him everything that happened. I think he found the whole thing adventurous and was sorry he wasn’t there, but I put his mind at ease and assured him it was much uncooler than it looked and sounded.

We broke camp and headed back down to civilization. On the way I got a few nice photos.

In the end, adventure can be sought but sometimes it is thrust upon you. Be ready!

Sadly, Olympic fever has once again gripped an otherwise reasonable city and turned it upside down. This time, the cheapened whore is London. Now, some of you may point out that I’ve never had much love for London, and that’s true. While I adore England, I’ve always found her capital to be a gray, grotty, sloppy amalgam of a city. It’s like there is no British vision whatsoever in the city. Which probably explains the massive influx of foreigners to “Londonistan” over the last three decades.

So sure, no love lost between me and London. But that doesn’t mean I would wish something as baleful and crass as the Olympics on her. I don’t particularly like Wichita Kansas but I would never express joy should a tornado rip the city apart. I’m an aesthete, not an animal.

London 2012 logo or Lisa Simpson sucking a dick? You decide!

Don’t get me wrong: I love the concept of the Olympics. I love the idea that young athletes can excel in their chosen sport and prove themselves to be world-class on a global stage. Hell, it makes me well up just thinking about it.

So why the anti-Olympic rancor? Because the Games and the process have been hijacked by politicians and corporations. And because this hijack is unnecessary.

Let’s start with the most odious of the processes: the city selection by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). This once-proud organization has degenerated into a cynical, corrupt panel of craven scumbags. The Salt Lake City and Beijing selection processes were so corrupt that journalists worldwide had a heyday documenting all the subterfuge and bribery.

Not only is the selection process tainted, but the very idea of world cities vying and bullying their way to Olympic glory is, in my mind, an idiotic process that should be abolished.

It’s sickening to watch. I have a better idea:

Since the Greek economy is about to go down the toilet and potentially take all of Europe with it, let’s bring the Games back home. Let’s make the Olympic Center in Athens permanent. After all, they invented the goddamn Games. Every four years, the Greek economy will get a massive boost with only a fraction of the capital expenditures that are wasted when a city builds an Olympic village from scratch.

The Winter Olympics can then be set up in the Alps. We can let Cortina D’Ampezzo and Chamonix host every other Winter Olympics. Done deal.

Now, some people will get all weepy because we aren’t “spreading the Olympics” all over the world. But like most weepy bullshit, this is just weepy bullshit. It’s the COMPETITORS that matter, not the location. The Olympics will be as international as ever. Young people from every corner of the globe will still have an opportunity to show the world how great they can be. It will be totally awesome and it will become something of a pilgrimage for people who love sport.

Athens will become a new Mecca. Young kids will dream of Athens. The legacy of the original games will connect these young people with a Democratic history going back thousands of years. It will be meaningful and wonderful.

Bring it on home, people!

So anyway, once the corrupt and evil IOC city selection process is finally ended, we can solve the next evil and corrupt problem associated with the Olympics: wasteful civic construction.

When a city hosts the Olympics, it has to build massive stadiums, massive villages, massive transportation solutions and massive security details. All for five weeks of Games. Five. Weeks. People are displaced, homes are destroyed, neighborhoods are altered and massive debt is incurred.

After that, the host city is stuck with massive walls of worthless bullshit. What do they do? They can’t fill them. They can’t lease them. The tear it all down. Yes, the Olympic Stadium in Los Angeles has held up for generations. But that arena is the exception that proves the rule: Olympic construction is a boon for contractors and temp employees and a total waste for taxpayers. The trail of disused, overgrown, wasted Olympic construction sites is endless. And sad.

Look, honey! It’s a cheap plastic piece of shit designed specifically to rip money from our pockets and into the greedy maw of a giant corporation!

Additionally, if we can site the Olympics permanently at Athens, we won’t need all that capital from all those scummy corporations. I wouldn’t dream of banning all corporate sponsorship; athletes need infrastructure for training and guidance. But the Games themselves do not need to be festooned with Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and BP Oil advertisements every 8 yards. If a company wants to support Olympic athletes, it should do so and feature advertisements that tout what nice fucking guys they are. But that’s where it should end. The Olympic site itself should be free of logoism and the dreary drumbeat of corporate cheerleading. After all, it’s supposed to be about the Games, right? About the young people? Remember them?

Which brings me to my last bitch about the Olympics:

Bringing you the Olympics we think you should see, you common scum!

NBC has the world’s shittiest Olympics coverage, bar none. I’d rather watch full Olympic coverage from Serbia or Laos even though I can’t understand their languages. I can understand a country wanting to highlight its own successful athletes. But NBC has warped its broadcasts as badly as North Korea. It’s all-USA, all the time. It’s pathetic. They think we’re too lazy, stupid and single-minded to enjoy the opening ceremony or something as “foreign” as fencing. That’s why I don’t bother watching the Olympics on NBC. I’m lucky enough to have Canadian broadcasts dribble into my TV. CBC does a MUCH better job than NBC.

I think NBC needs to let go. The Olympic Games should be broadcast by PBS. After all, they are our “national” broadcaster. I’m sure PBS would do a fine job highlighting America’s best competitors without turning it into a circle-jerk rah-rah session.

Back in the 1970’s, my mother regularly watched this British television program. It drove me nuts because it was so godawful boring. I mean, if we’re going to watch British TV, why the hell isn’t it Monty Python? I guess Upstairs Downstairs served its purpose: it entertained my mother and scared me off to do more productive childhood activities.

Now that I have assumed the mantle of middle age, I decided to give it a try. After all, it’s kind of like an outdated Downton Abbey shot on cheap video tape, right? And everyone loves Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey is so shiny and new!

All five seasons of Upstairs Downstairs are available on Netflix now, so I dug in. The first few episodes left me flat. Production quality was very poor (the BBC was suffering a crew strike at the time; some episodes were shot in B&W to save money). But I was beginning to understand what the writers were trying to do.

It was actually quite bold. They were framing a drama against the backdrop of much larger national questions and paradoxes of identity. The more I watched (and the more historical research it led me to), the more brilliant it became. By the end of the second season I was enthralled.

I wasn’t alone. Forty years ago, Upstairs Downstairs garnered seven Emmy awards and a Golden Globe. It has been viewed in 70 countries by over a billion people. How the hell did a tame, calm, very formal serial drama about Edwardian life in a London manor house capture the world’s imagination?

You really shouldn’t bang the help.

They did it with brilliant writing, lots of love stories and the inexorable march of history building tension about which the on-screen cast remains chillingly oblivious. I mean, why not hop aboard the Titanic? The bloody thing’s unsinkable, what?

Of course, the primary premise of the program was the strong distinction between the servant class (Downstairs) and the landed aristocracy (Upstairs).

The servant class was a peculiar rank in the British class system. While paid less than the working class, life among the sweeping stairways and colonnaded halls of the bourgeoisie placed the servants above the factory workers. It wasn’t money that determined class; it was placement.

Working as a servant has its privileges.

But perhaps the most resounding class theme in the program is the glass ceiling that kept the landed aristocracy eternally safe from the grubby mitts of the middle class. When a housemaid finds fame as an actress, no quarter is given. In the midst of childbirth, she is swept under the carpet as King Edward himself was dining at the house that night. Can’t have all that “creating new subjects” piffle interrupt a single puff of His Majesty’s cigar, can we?

The merchant class fares no better. They exist only to serve the house with goods and services. Even the ultra-wealthy Armenian magnate who has an eye for the daughter stands no ground. He is, after all, low born. End of discussion.

What’s most astounding is the inability of anyone to shift. It’s not about the money. What the hell is an uneducated servant girl going to do with a sudden windfall? Join the middle class? Is a successful merchant going to welcome an ex-parlourmaid to the family? Not bloody likely.

This may make you feel great antipathy toward the rich Bellamy family, but they are portrayed very carefully. The patriarch is tempered and wise and seems to have everyone’s best interests at heart. The matriarch is calm and elegant and handles the staff with sympathy. When they do show flashes of snobbery they are forgiven in our hearts.

Yet the nagging reality remains: how can they pay their loyal staff a goddamn pittance while living in such luxury? Now you are starting to see some parallels with modern society…

“Good luck, son! Don’t get blown up, what?”

Finally, as World War 1 closes in on the Bellamy family and all of Britain, a parallel series of breakthroughs occur. Young James comes back from the war a changed man. The sparkling playboy has seen enough. Even he – a conservative Tory – found the war to be stupid, useless and unnecessary. He forsakes all veteran accolades. He is sick of all the bullshit and has finally discovered that life (and death) are not games.

On a macro scale, the shattering of the European monarchical powers opened the floodgates of populist socialism. Revolution consumed Russia while electoral pressure ousted conservative governments. The family patriarch finds himself elevated to Viscount and hurriedly shuffled off to obscurity and powerlessness in the House of Lords.

The servants below, however, will have none of the worker’s rights and strikes. There should be some balance, they reason. There is tradition to uphold. And the masters upstairs have been so kind these many years. No, none of this socialist revolution for them. After all, this is a battle for the working class, and they aren’t the working class!

Two friends say goodbye.

Of course, the program’s real strength isn’t its subtext but its dramatic appeal. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better troupe of actors or more tightly woven scripts. Despite the stifling nature of Victorian mores, the program (and real life) is full of irrepressible joys and tearful losses. The house has its share of surprising deaths whose stark aftermath is handled in the Victorian fashion only by the Scottish butler, a true stoic. The rest of the family and staff soften their upper lips often enough to break your heart.

That’s the driving force here: the humanity. While great affairs swirl around the world, their impact is made visceral only when distilled in the context of family and community.

Master and servant, happy as clams.

And here is where I make my final point: in Upstairs Downstairs, the events that befall the classes are ultimately shared among the classes because they are largely thrown together despite the glass ceilings. In modern America, the classes are utterly isolated from each other. The moneyed class no longer sends its sons to war; that agony is left solely to the lower classes. When recession grips the nation, the moneyed class maintains its wealth with ease while the rest of us suffer. When the shit comes down, we don’t console each other or look out for each other. We turn on the TV and fume.

It isn’t Victorian morals that we’ve lost. It’s the technological isolation of our communities that has driven these wedges. We are more likely than the cast of Upstairs Downstairs to suffer in Victorian silence. They had each other, even when the stock market crashed and everything fell apart. One would think that in “class-free” America that we’d be more integrated socially. But we’re not.

At least we still have Leslie Anne Down!

Yes, we still have Leslie Anne Down. For that we should be eternally grateful.